DomainTheft.org Announces First Three Partners – Escrow.com, Flippa, and Domain Tools

I am excited to announce some exciting changes and improvements taking place at DomainTheft.org! We launched Domain Theft just over a month ago and I am happy to say that we’ve seen really positive feedback and today I’m excited to announce our first three partners! DomainTheft.org partners have full access to our database and can integrate it into their own platforms to improve security and help prevent the sale or transfer of stolen domain names.

The first three companies to join us in our fight against cyber-crime are: Escrow.com, Flippa, and Domain Tools. These are three companies that we see as major category leaders in their space and after talking with them about the solution we were offering, they were excited to partner with us in our fight against domain theft! Escrow.com is the leading domain name escrow service and one of the most trusted transactional partners on the Internet, Flippa is the #1 Website sales marketplace on the Internet, and Domain Tools is the leader in domain name intelligence.

“DomainTheft.org is a great idea and long overdue. We are pleased to be able to support safe and secure Internet transactions in any way possible,”

(Brandon Abbey, President of Escrow.com)

You can read more about this announcement in the press release we sent-out yesterday.

Along with the addition of three incredible partners we’ve also been doing customer development to find-out how we can best improve the system. We began surveying users on launch day and now have a month of data on what users like, what they don’t like, and what they would change. We released a survey and sent it around to a number of people who had domains stolen to get an idea of how they would improve the service, and with this data – we have made changes!

No Charge to List Stolen Domains – a month ago we thought the best way to ensure people weren’t trying to submit their competitors domains was to charge a small fee. The idea was that if you were lying and trying to just get a competitor’s name listed as stolen, you probably wouldn’t pay for it. After conducting gathering feedback we found-out that really nobody who had a domain name stolen wanted to pay to list it in our database. It makes sense, they just had a domain stolen…why would they want to add a monthly charge to it? They also felt that our procedure to verify their identity (requiring two forms of identification and a phone call) was more than enough to stop people from fraudulently submitting names from their competitors. So we listened to our users and have completely removed this fee.

Private Listings – a member of the domain community who has good experience recovering domain names recommended that we add private listings. This would mean that someone could list the name in our database but not make it available through our public search and thus only visible to our partners. We added this to our survey and around 15% of our respondents said this would be a useful feature for them – so we added it. You can now choose to list your names publicly or privately in our database.Company Structure – we are getting ready to make DomainTheft.org a non-profit organization. Our goal with this project is not to make money, but to increase awareness about domain theft and our service. The more people who check our database before buying a domain name (just like you’d check Carfax before buying a used car) the harder it will be to sell stolen domains. The money we receive from partners goes directly into advertising and running the service to increase awareness around domain name theft.

These are the changes we’ve made so far, but there’s more coming along with brand-new features we’ll be announcing soon. We are more excited than ever and from all the feedback we’re getting this services has definitely been needed. It’s something that I am personally passionate about and I can’t wait to share some of the other exciting things we’re doing as we move forward!

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